Bore Blasters Review

Jump in a gyrocopter and grab a bunch of ammunition, because you’re going to shoot holes in the ground until you’re done, or dead, in BORE BLASTERS. This pixel art 2D mining game with survivorlike and roguelike elements slipped under my radar when it released last year, but now that I’ve found it I decided to review it.

While there is a story, you’re not actually given much of it, or any instruction, during your first dig. You’re plopped into a gyrocopter and left to your own devices, whether you figure out the controls or not. But let me sum it up; you’re a dwarf and part of a group of dwarves working directly under the king, on a mission of visiting strange lands and digging into them. The area is full of a whole bunch of floating islands, and if you can dig down to the bottom of them, they’re marked as completed.

The main mechanic in Bore Blasters is destroying blocks of dirt with bullets. You also have a special move which is different depending on which of the three characters you’re playing as (two unlocked during missions), and requires a cooldown. As well as dirt, you destroy gem blocks, with better gems being further down, in order to earn money for upgrades. Gathering gems will fill a meter and give you access to special upgrades that will only last until the end of the run. These are things like more powerful bullets, block-destroying orbs of lightning, and stronger gem attraction.

Of course, it’s not just digging, you will have to do missions on many of the islands, such as mining specific ores, or locating some evil goblins. Oh yeah, there are enemies in this game, so it’s a good thing you already had a machine gun! Unfortunately for you, they’re unimpeded by the blocks and can happily attack you from behind the safety of some tough blocks where you can’t get them for several tense seconds. There are creatures, some of which shoot at you, others just want to collide with you, as well as the aforementioned goblins which have a few ways to attack, and since things get that little bit harder to see the deeper you go, you might not always see things being dropped onto you from above until it’s too late.

I’ll give Bore Blasters credit, at least your machine gun can deflect enemy ammunition, if it can’t outright destroy it, giving you precious moments to escape the direct path. However, I lost count of the number of times I tried to avoid something only to reposition myself directly into its path… Also, while things do get gloomy, one of the temporary upgrades will make everything easy to see, so it’s nice when that’s one of the options right near the start of a run.

While not really an issue, one of the temporary upgrades is to power up the gun when targeting elves, and yet elves don’t really factor into the game much at all, so it seems like a waste. Alternatively, I could have just not had it enabled when I was shooting at the enemy it is referring to. Another reason could be that it means goblins, but that seems like a silly mistake to make when elves are actually a thing in this game.

With a play time of about 15 hours to complete to 100%, I think Bore Blasters definitely has value for money. There is a Daily Run which you can attempt literally once per day, to see how you stack up against other players with a randomly equipped gyrocopter, adding some replay value to the game.